Silverman: A Hanukkah for all Americans

By Eric Silverman/Guest Columnist

Tuesday

Dec 4, 2018 at 4:18 AM

This week begins the quintessential Jewish-American holiday, once barely noticed on the annual religious calendar, now the Super Bowl of our public presence: Hanukkah. It is an ancient holiday that speaks to current dilemmas of American identity.

Most people know little about the events Hanukkah memorializes. Even many Jews can hardly do better than “they tried to destroy us, we won, let’s eat” - on this occasion, latkes and jelly donuts, accompanied by candle lighting, swapping gifts, perhaps a few silly songs.

The story is largely known from two ancient texts, 1 and 2 Maccabees, that were never included in the Jewish bible or Old Testament. In the second century B.C.E., the Seleucid Greeks ruled the eastern Mediterranean. They imposed, as colonizers are wont to do, their view of civilization on the local folks. Some Jews embraced Hellenistic culture as modern. Yet traditionalists revolted under the fabled leadership of Judah Maccabee and his band of brothers. They won, and thus lived to write the history every Jewish kid who sat through Hebrew School knows: brutal ethnic cleansing by the Greeks followed by the miracle of Jewish victory. The menorah is lit to recall the wonder of one day’s oil burning in the Temple candelabra for eight days.

Less well known is that the Maccabeans also took up arms against their fellow Jews or, as they saw them, reforming apostates. Are the Maccabeans brave liberators who defended the faith and lit a beacon of religious freedom? Or an ancient Taliban, ruthlessly conservative, snuffing out any who refused obedience? Probably a bit of both. That there is no singular way to define the moral message of the holiday is precisely why it speaks to our current uncertainties about what it means to be an American, unique yet one of the crowd.

Hanukkah attained its status as a major holiday in fin de siècle America, when Jewish immigrants became captivated by the celebration of Christmas, a holiday that gained its own stature and fanfare at the same time with the rise of consumerism. In fact, many Jewish immigrants did not at first realize that Christmas was Christian. To them, it seemed a grand American fete. In 1897, Ridley’s department store in New York City, then the world’s largest shopping emporium, ran a Yiddish advertisement in the Yiddishes Tageblatt newspaper announcing, “Chanukah gifts with Christmas presents go hand in hand. There is only a difference in name.” Acculturated Jews eagerly took up Hanukkah as a holiday that celebrated their new-found hybrid identity as Jewish Americans, neither the one, nor the other, but both together in an irresolvable dialogue.

Over the 20th century, Hanukkah often morphed into a Jewish Christmas. Just now I searched for “Chanukah” - there is no official spelling - on the Wal-Mart website. I got more than 16,000 items. You read that correctly. One can purchase toy sets, glitter stickers, ugly sweaters, LED menorahs, glass ball ornaments, garlands, sno-globes, coloring books, socks, hats, cookies, wrapping paper, and more, including a library of children’s books - who knew that Clifford the Big Red Dog and Curious George were Jewish? There are even Hanukkah Mad Libs. And you’ve still got more than 14,000 items to go.

Today, Americans celebrate ethnic uniqueness by hyphenating identities with romantic attachments to homelands, stories of unsung heroes and heroines, and affirmations that “our” - Asian, black, Irish, Armenian, Deaf, indigenous, Arab, Jewish, and more - heritage matters. At the same time, we all aspire to legal and social equality - to celebrating our full seat at the table of American citizenship. We are different. Yet we are not. You’ve got your greeting cards; I’ve got mine. One kid glances at an Elf on a Shelf; another at the Mentsh on a Bench. That tension gives rise to much of the vibrancy of the country.

In the current political climate, American Jews occupy a precarious position, vilified from both the right and the left as Shylocks and outsiders, villains and puppet-masters. The canards are old and tiresome. Thus phrased, Hanukkah is an act of decolonization, a celebration of diversity by simply showing that we are still here.

Hanukkah says something of value to all Americans if we view the holiday as one episode in an age-old conversation among a particular people over how to define our collective identity. Thus phrased, Hanukkah speaks to every ethnic group that struggles, as they all do, with the “push-me-pull-you” of multiculturalism: how to balance the opposing forces of generic citizenship and ethnic particularism or, as the national motto goes, the “pluribus” with the “unim.”

Eric Silverman is a Framingham resident, a Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and author of "A Cultural History of Jewish Dress."